Contemporary art by seven Nigerian artists on display in Arezzo

Ebenezer Akinola, Habeeb Andu, Ola Balogun, Oluwole Omofemi, Opedun Damilola, Tope Fatumbi, and Michel Okpare are the names of the Nigerian contemporary art artists featured in the exhibition En ensemble of voices curated by Oluwole Omofemi and Alessandro Romanini, scheduled at Lis10 Gallery in Arezzo from Nov. 18, 2023 to Jan. 13, 2024.

Nigeria is not only the most populous country on the African continent, with more than 215 million inhabitants, but also the one with the most complex and articulated art-historical tradition since pre-colonial times, in all fields of culture. A nation that since independence in 1960, despite a long dictatorship, civil war (1967-1970), and continuous political turmoil, has developed a steadily rising economy, boasts a very high cultural level of its diaspora (61 percent of university graduates compared to 32 percent of Americans), and invests in art, culture and education as a driver of development, more than any other African country.

From literature that can count on Africa’s first Nobel Prize winner, playwright Wole Soyinka to female writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Nollywood” productions have conquered cinemas and digital platforms, and music has been able to capitalize on Fela Kuti’s Afro beat legacy with artists that have climbed the international charts such as Burna Boy, Rema, Tems, Davido and Tiwa savage.

The exhibition represents a further step in the path of research pursued by the Arezzo gallery (which recently opened a branch in Paris) towards contemporary African artistic creation. An exhibition that carries out a welding between the two latest Nigerian artistic generations, thus showing an exhaustive panorama of the evolution and creative richness that characterizes the West African country; from the established artists with an international-level curriculum such as Ebenezer Akinola (1968) and Ola Balogun (1972), passing through Tope Fatumbi (1975), to the new creative levers that have already been able to impose themselves on the world stage, from exhibitions in public and private spaces, museums, foundations and fairs, such as artist and curator Oluwole Omofemi (1988), and Opedun Danilola (1983) to the younger Michel Okpare already the protagonist recently of exhibitions in Los Angeles, St. Petersburg and Cape Town.

The exhibited artists’ works testify to a rare ability to harmonize historical cultural roots, tribal identity roots (such as Uli body painting or calligraphic style) with contemporary iconographic experimentation, ranging from figurative research to geometric and tachist abstraction to collage.

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Contemporary art by seven Nigerian artists on display in Arezzo

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